Word: neutrinos
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...neutrino is the most elusive and mysterious of the some 30 known particles of energy scattered by the splitting of the atom. For more than two decades the neutrino was known only in theory. It has no electric charge or mass of its own. It travels at the speed of light, can penetrate matter equal to 100 million miles of lead without being stopped. Billions of neutrinos bombard each square centimeter of the earth's surface every second; but every one of them eluded scientists until 1956. Then physicists detected the first neutrinos in the debris from man-made...
First thing the neutrinos will measure is the temperature of the core. Astrophysicists now estimate it at 29 million degrees F., but the neutrino observatory will give a firmer figure because the nuclear reaction that produces solar neutrinos is favored by high temperature. If Dr. Davis counts more neutrinos than current formulas predict, astrophysicists will know that the temperature of the core is higher than they have guessed...
This elusiveness makes neutrinos hard to deal with. Though scientists have been convinced that the particles exist, they were not directly detected until 1956 when Physicists Frederick Reines and Clyde Cowan Jr., of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, set up a monstrous apparatus near the Atomic Energy Commission's Savannah River reactor, which looses vast floods of neutrinos. A few times each hour while the reactor was working, the detector registered an "event." This meant that a single neutrino, out of many billions of billions per second, had actually hit something...
...this snug foxhole, Reines will assemble a vast neutrino trap, designed at Cleveland's Case Institute. Even the most powerful cosmic rays do not penetrate to the depth of the gold mine, but the entire universe is believed to be swarming with neutrinos that will be deterred not at all by two miles of rock. Some of them are believed to carry unusual amounts of energy, and these fat neutrinos should be easier to detect than leaner ones...
Ashes of Creation. Part of the Reines apparatus will lie in wait for fat neutrinos. Another part will have several hundred square yards of scintillation counters to watch for mu-mesons generated by neutrinos that hit particles in the rock surrounding the mine. On the earth's surface these neutrino-induced mu-mesons are almost impossible to identify because of confusion caused by cosmic rays...